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Episode 3: BrianBrian Meegan is a formerly-incarcerated artist and personal trainer whose work is featured throughout the Queer Prisoner’s Comix Anthology series from A.B.O. Comix. He discusses coming to prison as an openly-gay man, facing discrimination due to his HIV status, facilitating queer and trans community on the inside, and finding joy in the darkest places.
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INTRO
Conductor Trig: You are now boarding Teleway 411, departing from the realm of brick and barbed wire. Next stop, inside the minds and lives locked away behind bars. Beware of the shifting airwaves as they may cause turbulence. Please stand clear of the evolving doors.
Casper: Dispatching from the Telegraph and Broadway terminal in Oakland, we transport the stories of queer artists in prison throughout the United States. Our conversations with people navigating the justice system work to shed light on the reality of life inside. My name is Casper and I am the co-founder and host of Teleway 411, a podcast produced by A.B.O. Comix.
The Teleway was invented because of the archaic routes required to navigate the prison system. The restrictions put in place require creative detours to reach our contributors inside. Communication is halted at the discretion of the prison, and can leave our passengers feeling stranded. However, by using the Teleway to defy space and time, we’re able to come together and traverse the lives that have been stalled indefinitely, while also giving them a push to move them forward.
Today our passenger is Brian. We first published him in 2017 after he submitted his comic to us for our yearly anthology. Thankfully, we’ve been able to stay in contact with him since his 2020 release. This episode we discuss finding the positivity in every situation, the ups and downs of being openly gay in prison, and how to achieve that perfect donkey booty. We’ll let him introduce himself.
Brian: My name is Brian. I was in prison for seven and a half years, and then on probation for a year and a half and just got off probation last month. So when you invited me to do the podcast, I decided to come out here and meet you all that have been so helpful while I was gone.
Casper: Well, we're so glad to meet you. We had an event here last night and Ollie and myself got to meet you for the first time and it was absolutely magical. It's wonderful to have you here and I'm really excited to get to chat with you. What has it been like for you since you've come home from prison?
Brian: I am fortunate in the fact that I found a job fairly quickly even in COVID. Although, I think coming out in COVID made things easier somewhat because everyone else was under confusion as to how to interact now.
I think I was equally confused. It was not noticeable that mine was because I was coming back from prison, whereas everyone else was coming back from isolation. And then I was very fortunate to get jobs.
Casper: You've entered into a time of really intense turmoil into the world. And you did a comic right before coming back home for us. And it's in the Confined Before COVID19 edition: one of our anthologies featuring comics and artwork about how the pandemic is affecting people inside prison. I think your comic was about the hesitancy reentering back into the world in such a weird state where people are in lockdown and there's a virus going around and nobody really understood the extent of it at the time and how deadly it was and how badly it was going to affect the entire world.
Do you feel like that has played out in reality? Has it been as intense as you imagined?
Brian: When I drew that comic, it was because for seven years I had dreamed of getting out and finally getting to wake up with a man, as opposed to having maybe just if lucky, a little time together. When you're in prison, you have very very little else to do besides dream. And you set up all these expectations in your head. And being HIV positive, we didn't know how it fared against COVID at the time. So then there was all the fears of now I'm being thrown out into this world. The policies that were being written for inmates were very dicey at the time because it was being told to the public that we were getting masks or that we were getting protected in some way, and yet the guards were coming in without masks on, we weren't provided masks.
We were kept apart from all of each other. So then we couldn’t interact with each other that well, except for who you were locked in on the block with. So we didn't have visits anymore, but the guards came in without masks on. So they were going out to the public and we knew that's how we would get it if we got it, it was because of the guards. And ultimately actually within about three to four weeks of me leaving prison in May of 2020, the entire block that I was on got COVID and not everyone survived. My friend Charlise was explaining to me in a letter about how they were moving people from newly diagnosed to two weeks through it and just transferring people around to the different pods in certain buildings. Originally they were just hiding people in the infirmary. And then when I got out, I remember I was like, okay, “So, you're going to give me a mask, when I leave” and they were like “No,” and I'm like, but luckily my friend was picking me up and she and her mother had sewed one for me.
Casper: Did they send you on your way with any supplies at all? You just basically had the clothes on your back?
Brian: They told me to wrap a t-shirt around my face.
Casper: It's not surprising, but it's still disappointing to hear.
Brian: Exactly. It did not shock me. What is put out to the public and what is actually happening is not always the same thing.
Casper: We got a ton of public release statements from prisons when we requested them about what is your safety protocol for COVID19. What are the practices you're putting in place to keep people safe? And they had their whole long PR spiel about, “We're providing hand sanitizer and we're providing masks for everybody and we're doing social distancing.” And then every letter that we received from people was the complete opposite of that. They were like, “We've never seen hand sanitizer in here.“
Brian: Because it has alcohol in it. There is non-alcoholic hand sanitizer and such that we couldn't get any of it onto the commissary. Like, we were willing to pay for it, y’know.
Then again, also for the seven years, we were trying to get them to allow us to have a second roll of toilet paper, as opposed to just the one a week. Y’know, it was not really surprising.
Casper: When I tried to do e-commissary orders and stuff for people trying to just get toilet paper and toothpaste and deodorant and stuff, half the time it's out of stock online and it's out of stock in the prison commissary, and it just doesn't exist for people anymore. People are like, “I haven't had a shower in three weeks and I don't know what to do with myself.”
Brian: Some people find it sexy, but when it's not voluntary, it’s not.
Casper: Dispatching from the Telegraph and Broadway terminal in Oakland, we transport the stories of queer artists in prison throughout the United States. Our conversations with people navigating the justice system work to shed light on the reality of life inside. My name is Casper and I am the co-founder and host of Teleway 411, a podcast produced by A.B.O. Comix.
The Teleway was invented because of the archaic routes required to navigate the prison system. The restrictions put in place require creative detours to reach our contributors inside. Communication is halted at the discretion of the prison, and can leave our passengers feeling stranded. However, by using the Teleway to defy space and time, we’re able to come together and traverse the lives that have been stalled indefinitely, while also giving them a push to move them forward.
Today our passenger is Brian. We first published him in 2017 after he submitted his comic to us for our yearly anthology. Thankfully, we’ve been able to stay in contact with him since his 2020 release. This episode we discuss finding the positivity in every situation, the ups and downs of being openly gay in prison, and how to achieve that perfect donkey booty. We’ll let him introduce himself.
Brian: My name is Brian. I was in prison for seven and a half years, and then on probation for a year and a half and just got off probation last month. So when you invited me to do the podcast, I decided to come out here and meet you all that have been so helpful while I was gone.
Casper: Well, we're so glad to meet you. We had an event here last night and Ollie and myself got to meet you for the first time and it was absolutely magical. It's wonderful to have you here and I'm really excited to get to chat with you. What has it been like for you since you've come home from prison?
Brian: I am fortunate in the fact that I found a job fairly quickly even in COVID. Although, I think coming out in COVID made things easier somewhat because everyone else was under confusion as to how to interact now.
I think I was equally confused. It was not noticeable that mine was because I was coming back from prison, whereas everyone else was coming back from isolation. And then I was very fortunate to get jobs.
Casper: You've entered into a time of really intense turmoil into the world. And you did a comic right before coming back home for us. And it's in the Confined Before COVID19 edition: one of our anthologies featuring comics and artwork about how the pandemic is affecting people inside prison. I think your comic was about the hesitancy reentering back into the world in such a weird state where people are in lockdown and there's a virus going around and nobody really understood the extent of it at the time and how deadly it was and how badly it was going to affect the entire world.
Do you feel like that has played out in reality? Has it been as intense as you imagined?
Brian: When I drew that comic, it was because for seven years I had dreamed of getting out and finally getting to wake up with a man, as opposed to having maybe just if lucky, a little time together. When you're in prison, you have very very little else to do besides dream. And you set up all these expectations in your head. And being HIV positive, we didn't know how it fared against COVID at the time. So then there was all the fears of now I'm being thrown out into this world. The policies that were being written for inmates were very dicey at the time because it was being told to the public that we were getting masks or that we were getting protected in some way, and yet the guards were coming in without masks on, we weren't provided masks.
We were kept apart from all of each other. So then we couldn’t interact with each other that well, except for who you were locked in on the block with. So we didn't have visits anymore, but the guards came in without masks on. So they were going out to the public and we knew that's how we would get it if we got it, it was because of the guards. And ultimately actually within about three to four weeks of me leaving prison in May of 2020, the entire block that I was on got COVID and not everyone survived. My friend Charlise was explaining to me in a letter about how they were moving people from newly diagnosed to two weeks through it and just transferring people around to the different pods in certain buildings. Originally they were just hiding people in the infirmary. And then when I got out, I remember I was like, okay, “So, you're going to give me a mask, when I leave” and they were like “No,” and I'm like, but luckily my friend was picking me up and she and her mother had sewed one for me.
Casper: Did they send you on your way with any supplies at all? You just basically had the clothes on your back?
Brian: They told me to wrap a t-shirt around my face.
Casper: It's not surprising, but it's still disappointing to hear.
Brian: Exactly. It did not shock me. What is put out to the public and what is actually happening is not always the same thing.
Casper: We got a ton of public release statements from prisons when we requested them about what is your safety protocol for COVID19. What are the practices you're putting in place to keep people safe? And they had their whole long PR spiel about, “We're providing hand sanitizer and we're providing masks for everybody and we're doing social distancing.” And then every letter that we received from people was the complete opposite of that. They were like, “We've never seen hand sanitizer in here.“
Brian: Because it has alcohol in it. There is non-alcoholic hand sanitizer and such that we couldn't get any of it onto the commissary. Like, we were willing to pay for it, y’know.
Then again, also for the seven years, we were trying to get them to allow us to have a second roll of toilet paper, as opposed to just the one a week. Y’know, it was not really surprising.
Casper: When I tried to do e-commissary orders and stuff for people trying to just get toilet paper and toothpaste and deodorant and stuff, half the time it's out of stock online and it's out of stock in the prison commissary, and it just doesn't exist for people anymore. People are like, “I haven't had a shower in three weeks and I don't know what to do with myself.”
Brian: Some people find it sexy, but when it's not voluntary, it’s not.
DREAMS
Casper: Absolutely not. But you did mention that when you're on the inside, you have a lot of time to dream. And that's something that I've been really interested in is the dreams that people have on the inside and how people occupy their thoughts, their future plans and all of that sort of stuff. Because one of my friends, Taylor, who I was telling you about a little bit earlier, we did a podcast recording with her, she went in when she was 16 years old and she was telling me that for the first couple of years, she was in the inside, she dreamt about being outside in the free world for about two years or so. And then after that, after those first two years were over, she started dreaming exclusively about being in prison. And that's the setting of all of her dreams after that.
And how that was a kind of strange mental switch where she no longer dreamt about the outside world, that was like her entire world. And so that's been really interesting to me. Does the environment affect…of course it affects your sleep cycle, constant interruptions and guards checking on people every couple hours and it's just not the environment for a good night's rest. But what was your experience and did you have any dreams that stood out to you?
Brian: Being on HIV meds, sometimes the dreams that we have are induced by the medication, actually, one of the side effects is very vivid dreams. But I don't always remember them honestly. This one building, they kept the lights on all night and that was really hard. I got used to sleeping basically with a sheet and blanket over my head, even when it was hot, you still sometimes have the blanket on, because the sheet doesn't cover the light that much. We would complain about it because it's actually was not supposed to be like that. But there's no way you can prove it because to get somebody in there to look at things, they have to go through all the guards so they can just turn the lights off whenever they want to and just say they didn't do that. So yeah, the sleeping is just a whole different issue, so more, as far as dealing with prison in the future I taught a program. I was an inmate teacher for a decision-making program. But since so many people are in for so many different lengths of time, anywhere from just a short stint, 10 months, to mine which was a nine year sentence, to other people who have a life sentence. While teaching this program, I started to look at the percentages of how I looked at things.
When I first got into prison, the first probably year or two was learning how to deal with the new environment because I had never been in prison before and I was a 36 or 37 year old, gay white man going into prison. I didn't know anybody there.
I was in a state where I didn't know anyone. One of my friends who I met the first day that I got to the compound goes: “You might want to show people your status sheet so that people know what you're in for, so there's no misjudgements about you.” So it was learning a whole new life that I was going to be living for a long time.
So the first year was acclimation. After that it was just accepting that was where I was going to be for a very long time and not disrupting my days so much. And having dreams of the future, but not that it's going to be tomorrow because that then can get very depressing. So when I would see people that were leaving soon, they would start to lose it a little bit because of all the anxiety.
I knew that I had so much time that I couldn't live like that, thinking about the future so much, because that produces the anxiety. On a day-to-day basis, it would just be too much to handle. So when people would be getting out soon and they would feel bad complaining about getting out soon to someone that had four or five, six more years to do. And I was like, “No, I completely understand. And when I'm closer to getting out, like you are now, I hope someone will listen to my anxiety because it's real.” Like, I know that I'm spending Christmas or New Year's or whatever it is in prison.
In prison, you don't see the people that succeed. You only see the people who come back. So it's not a reality that's drilled into us that you can succeed. That you don't have to go back.
So four of the guys I did time with, we all did approximately the same amount of time and we all got out approximately the same time, luckily all before COVID hit the block. We chit chat, not on the regular but like once a month. I write poetry whenever I get emotional or blocked and it came out – We evolved beyond the revolve of the door.” And, because the prison revolving door, it takes evolution and it takes real work to stop it from fishing you back in.
Casper: Yeah, you did this really beautiful comic about the revolving door of the prison system. And that one always really stuck with me because in our society’s concept of prison is it's either punitive 100%, taking people who, quote unquote, did something bad and punishing them, or it's supposed to be rehabilitative.
And there's no real emphasis that I can see on the rehabilitation. Okay, some prisons have college classes, some prisons have some programs, we've got like maybe a craft shop or something here, but I don't see a whole lot of emphasis on making sure that people have the resources in place when they're coming home, that they don't go right back into the system.
I've had friends who have big plans for coming home. And they're really excited and they're like: “I'm never fucking going back to this. This is it. This time I'm getting out and it's going to be great.” And then they're out for like three months and then there's some stupid parole violation.
Then all of a sudden you're back in prison. And people are really scared and they're walking on eggshells and they're trying to do things right a lot of the time, but they just don't have the resources, the money, the support, even a place to go half the time, that people are just funneled right back into the system.
And it's really devastating seeing people come back who were maybe, really looking forward to getting out, really excited and had big dreams and hopes. I imagine that to be really hard.
Brian: In the prison I was in they didn't like us interacting with the other buildings cause that's where contraband gets passed. So you wouldn't see somebody for a couple of months or a year, and then you'd see them. And you didn't know if they had gone home and come back, or if they were just in a different building.
So you never really found out what the answer was, because there are certain questions that you do not ask, and that is one of them. I'm very adamant to discuss the fact that I made an effort to use the time as best I could while I was there. But it was not because the prison provided it.
I was very fortunate to make friends there. Being an openly gay man, they actually respected that my honesty, as opposed to shunning me. And one of the guys had told me that the inmates help each other. It's not the guards. It's not the system. It's not the counselors. If you need to get into a program because you need to get good time or because you need to get points off your records, so you can move to a better housing unit. It is the inmates who will get you on the list to get into that program.
It has nothing to do with the counselor who's supposed to be doing it. It was us helping each other. The environment fosters a sense of community and a sense of family that encompasses all the meanings of those words. The hate, the anger, the irritation, because they become your family. So they irritate you, just like a sibling or a parent or a child, depending on your relationship with each person.
Casper: That is a really beautiful and succinct way to put it. And it reinforces so many of the relationships I have with folks who are in prison, who know each other. It's always funny to get on the phone with somebody who's in the prison with somebody else that I write with. And they're like, “You will never believe what so-and-so did today.” And then will talk my ear off about one of my other friends who’s also incarcerated for like 20 minutes and then end the conversation with, “but I love him to death.” [Laughs]
Brian: Especially amongst our community. In the prison I was in with there weren't a lot of openly queer people.
So whenever I was blessed to be on a pod with one, I tried to be as welcoming and open and bonding with them as possible and not view them as an adversary. Maybe more of a sisterly bond or however you want to put it.
I was so fortunate to have one of these sisters with me when the Orlando Pulse shooting happened. If I had been on that block by myself, I don't know how I would've been able to handle it, but having her there with me, we had each other's back to listen to and talk to each other and even just sit next to each other and watch it. We weren't alone. And that helped so much, but that being said, she and one of my other friends who I didn't meet until later, did not like each other. I tried not to get involved in those types of disputes, but it does occur just like any other family.
Casper: What does it look like as far as community groups inside prison? What is a day in the life of getting to hang out with a friend inside prison?
Brian: Most of my housing units were dormitory, which are torture in my opinion. One of them was 44 people, we all worked in the kitchen together. So it wasn't just that we lived together. We all worked together also. And we are locked in a dorm together with the phones, the showers, the toilets, and everything else there.
And then we would all leave and go to work and all come back. That was where we hung out. There was no day room or rec room or anything else. You pull up your locker box, you play cards, whatever it is. But then you also have to make sure that your celly doesn't mind, that they're all in your neighborhood.
And then the other unit it was considered protective custody, although it really wasn't, but it had a guard on the tier and there was an upstairs and a downstairs and downstairs, it had the chow hall. And the chow hall was used as a day area when we weren't eating, but the showers were all open to the chow hall. So the toilets, the showers, everything was all open to everyone. And that was the point of putting gay people there so that there would be no messing around. All eyes on everyone at all times. And there were 70 of us on that pod. That was the most torture I've ever been in. As I said, the guys all respected me because of my being openly gay. But what the guys all wanted to know was who was coming at me on the low. So although they were adamant about respecting me, my business was always their focus because they wanted to know who was hitting on me. So inadvertently that made my life very uncomfortable because a lot of eyes were on me a lot of the time.
It made it very lonely because people would not talk to me a lot of the times because of the fear of the misperception of hitting on me and misperception is one of my least favorite words now, because it's also one of the rules where when I was working in the kitchen, I could be fired for the “misperception of perceived contamination” were the actual, exact words in the handbook. The “misperception of perceived contamination,” because I'm HIV positive, that I could somehow infect the community from being in the kitchen or serving food. So misperceptions are really hard because it covered a lot of my experience in prison.
Casper: Yeah. I have gone through quite a few prison handbooks which are not always available to people in prison. I’ve found a lot of times, there are rules in place that the prison does not outwardly share with the people who are incarcerated there.
So people break a rule and they have no idea it's a rule. In reading a lot of these handbooks and trying to get information to people about rules that they're supposed to follow, there is a lot of language like you mentioned. A lot of times ambiguous and very subjective. So it’s like whoever the officer is, however they interpret this rule, they're welcome to enforce it however they see fit. But a lot of times I see it will criminalize the LGBT community, even if it isn't purposefully written in that way. It's open to interpretation enough that say a queer person is having any sort of even just a friendly relationship with another person, if they put their hand on their shoulder or something or show affection in this sort of way, that would get time added to their sentence.
It'll be criminalized. Sometimes they'll have to go to court again and prove something and, God forbid they actually have a real relationship with another human being. It surpasses being frowned upon, it's a criminal offense within the prison system.
Brian: I was also very fortunate to meet a wonderful person while I was there and who actually made me a better person. He and I had a very important relationship to me. I've been positive since 2001.
I had had men reject me constantly for being HIV positive. I tried telling them on the first date and that way I wouldn't get emotionally attached. I tried waiting until like the third date and see maybe if they got to know me better, that they could look past it. All of it it always went badly.
It was called back then being stood up. Now it's just called being ghosted. Now this is a man who was locked in the dormitory with me, and this could go very badly because a lot of us have impulse control problems, and that's why we were in prison. When I told him that I was HIV positive and that's why I wasn't going far with him, he cried and I had never had anybody react that way to me before. It was also when he told me he appreciated me, it sounded more like, “I love you” than anyone who had ever said those three words. But anyway, so our relationship was found out. We went to the hole for 60 days because even though it was consensual it's still considered evil. I went to a new housing unit because they separated us. I had gotten a job on the food cart and because of the fear of “misperception of perceived contamination,” I petitioned for a different job.
And there was a job cleaning the guards’ bathrooms. I remember one of the guards that I fairly got along with. He told me that they were trying to get me fired. I came up with the list. I’m like: “So is it because I'm gay? Is it because I'm dating a Black man? Or is it because I'm HIV positive?” He goes, "Well, a little bit of each, but mostly the last one."
And how that was a kind of strange mental switch where she no longer dreamt about the outside world, that was like her entire world. And so that's been really interesting to me. Does the environment affect…of course it affects your sleep cycle, constant interruptions and guards checking on people every couple hours and it's just not the environment for a good night's rest. But what was your experience and did you have any dreams that stood out to you?
Brian: Being on HIV meds, sometimes the dreams that we have are induced by the medication, actually, one of the side effects is very vivid dreams. But I don't always remember them honestly. This one building, they kept the lights on all night and that was really hard. I got used to sleeping basically with a sheet and blanket over my head, even when it was hot, you still sometimes have the blanket on, because the sheet doesn't cover the light that much. We would complain about it because it's actually was not supposed to be like that. But there's no way you can prove it because to get somebody in there to look at things, they have to go through all the guards so they can just turn the lights off whenever they want to and just say they didn't do that. So yeah, the sleeping is just a whole different issue, so more, as far as dealing with prison in the future I taught a program. I was an inmate teacher for a decision-making program. But since so many people are in for so many different lengths of time, anywhere from just a short stint, 10 months, to mine which was a nine year sentence, to other people who have a life sentence. While teaching this program, I started to look at the percentages of how I looked at things.
When I first got into prison, the first probably year or two was learning how to deal with the new environment because I had never been in prison before and I was a 36 or 37 year old, gay white man going into prison. I didn't know anybody there.
I was in a state where I didn't know anyone. One of my friends who I met the first day that I got to the compound goes: “You might want to show people your status sheet so that people know what you're in for, so there's no misjudgements about you.” So it was learning a whole new life that I was going to be living for a long time.
So the first year was acclimation. After that it was just accepting that was where I was going to be for a very long time and not disrupting my days so much. And having dreams of the future, but not that it's going to be tomorrow because that then can get very depressing. So when I would see people that were leaving soon, they would start to lose it a little bit because of all the anxiety.
I knew that I had so much time that I couldn't live like that, thinking about the future so much, because that produces the anxiety. On a day-to-day basis, it would just be too much to handle. So when people would be getting out soon and they would feel bad complaining about getting out soon to someone that had four or five, six more years to do. And I was like, “No, I completely understand. And when I'm closer to getting out, like you are now, I hope someone will listen to my anxiety because it's real.” Like, I know that I'm spending Christmas or New Year's or whatever it is in prison.
In prison, you don't see the people that succeed. You only see the people who come back. So it's not a reality that's drilled into us that you can succeed. That you don't have to go back.
So four of the guys I did time with, we all did approximately the same amount of time and we all got out approximately the same time, luckily all before COVID hit the block. We chit chat, not on the regular but like once a month. I write poetry whenever I get emotional or blocked and it came out – We evolved beyond the revolve of the door.” And, because the prison revolving door, it takes evolution and it takes real work to stop it from fishing you back in.
Casper: Yeah, you did this really beautiful comic about the revolving door of the prison system. And that one always really stuck with me because in our society’s concept of prison is it's either punitive 100%, taking people who, quote unquote, did something bad and punishing them, or it's supposed to be rehabilitative.
And there's no real emphasis that I can see on the rehabilitation. Okay, some prisons have college classes, some prisons have some programs, we've got like maybe a craft shop or something here, but I don't see a whole lot of emphasis on making sure that people have the resources in place when they're coming home, that they don't go right back into the system.
I've had friends who have big plans for coming home. And they're really excited and they're like: “I'm never fucking going back to this. This is it. This time I'm getting out and it's going to be great.” And then they're out for like three months and then there's some stupid parole violation.
Then all of a sudden you're back in prison. And people are really scared and they're walking on eggshells and they're trying to do things right a lot of the time, but they just don't have the resources, the money, the support, even a place to go half the time, that people are just funneled right back into the system.
And it's really devastating seeing people come back who were maybe, really looking forward to getting out, really excited and had big dreams and hopes. I imagine that to be really hard.
Brian: In the prison I was in they didn't like us interacting with the other buildings cause that's where contraband gets passed. So you wouldn't see somebody for a couple of months or a year, and then you'd see them. And you didn't know if they had gone home and come back, or if they were just in a different building.
So you never really found out what the answer was, because there are certain questions that you do not ask, and that is one of them. I'm very adamant to discuss the fact that I made an effort to use the time as best I could while I was there. But it was not because the prison provided it.
I was very fortunate to make friends there. Being an openly gay man, they actually respected that my honesty, as opposed to shunning me. And one of the guys had told me that the inmates help each other. It's not the guards. It's not the system. It's not the counselors. If you need to get into a program because you need to get good time or because you need to get points off your records, so you can move to a better housing unit. It is the inmates who will get you on the list to get into that program.
It has nothing to do with the counselor who's supposed to be doing it. It was us helping each other. The environment fosters a sense of community and a sense of family that encompasses all the meanings of those words. The hate, the anger, the irritation, because they become your family. So they irritate you, just like a sibling or a parent or a child, depending on your relationship with each person.
Casper: That is a really beautiful and succinct way to put it. And it reinforces so many of the relationships I have with folks who are in prison, who know each other. It's always funny to get on the phone with somebody who's in the prison with somebody else that I write with. And they're like, “You will never believe what so-and-so did today.” And then will talk my ear off about one of my other friends who’s also incarcerated for like 20 minutes and then end the conversation with, “but I love him to death.” [Laughs]
Brian: Especially amongst our community. In the prison I was in with there weren't a lot of openly queer people.
So whenever I was blessed to be on a pod with one, I tried to be as welcoming and open and bonding with them as possible and not view them as an adversary. Maybe more of a sisterly bond or however you want to put it.
I was so fortunate to have one of these sisters with me when the Orlando Pulse shooting happened. If I had been on that block by myself, I don't know how I would've been able to handle it, but having her there with me, we had each other's back to listen to and talk to each other and even just sit next to each other and watch it. We weren't alone. And that helped so much, but that being said, she and one of my other friends who I didn't meet until later, did not like each other. I tried not to get involved in those types of disputes, but it does occur just like any other family.
Casper: What does it look like as far as community groups inside prison? What is a day in the life of getting to hang out with a friend inside prison?
Brian: Most of my housing units were dormitory, which are torture in my opinion. One of them was 44 people, we all worked in the kitchen together. So it wasn't just that we lived together. We all worked together also. And we are locked in a dorm together with the phones, the showers, the toilets, and everything else there.
And then we would all leave and go to work and all come back. That was where we hung out. There was no day room or rec room or anything else. You pull up your locker box, you play cards, whatever it is. But then you also have to make sure that your celly doesn't mind, that they're all in your neighborhood.
And then the other unit it was considered protective custody, although it really wasn't, but it had a guard on the tier and there was an upstairs and a downstairs and downstairs, it had the chow hall. And the chow hall was used as a day area when we weren't eating, but the showers were all open to the chow hall. So the toilets, the showers, everything was all open to everyone. And that was the point of putting gay people there so that there would be no messing around. All eyes on everyone at all times. And there were 70 of us on that pod. That was the most torture I've ever been in. As I said, the guys all respected me because of my being openly gay. But what the guys all wanted to know was who was coming at me on the low. So although they were adamant about respecting me, my business was always their focus because they wanted to know who was hitting on me. So inadvertently that made my life very uncomfortable because a lot of eyes were on me a lot of the time.
It made it very lonely because people would not talk to me a lot of the times because of the fear of the misperception of hitting on me and misperception is one of my least favorite words now, because it's also one of the rules where when I was working in the kitchen, I could be fired for the “misperception of perceived contamination” were the actual, exact words in the handbook. The “misperception of perceived contamination,” because I'm HIV positive, that I could somehow infect the community from being in the kitchen or serving food. So misperceptions are really hard because it covered a lot of my experience in prison.
Casper: Yeah. I have gone through quite a few prison handbooks which are not always available to people in prison. I’ve found a lot of times, there are rules in place that the prison does not outwardly share with the people who are incarcerated there.
So people break a rule and they have no idea it's a rule. In reading a lot of these handbooks and trying to get information to people about rules that they're supposed to follow, there is a lot of language like you mentioned. A lot of times ambiguous and very subjective. So it’s like whoever the officer is, however they interpret this rule, they're welcome to enforce it however they see fit. But a lot of times I see it will criminalize the LGBT community, even if it isn't purposefully written in that way. It's open to interpretation enough that say a queer person is having any sort of even just a friendly relationship with another person, if they put their hand on their shoulder or something or show affection in this sort of way, that would get time added to their sentence.
It'll be criminalized. Sometimes they'll have to go to court again and prove something and, God forbid they actually have a real relationship with another human being. It surpasses being frowned upon, it's a criminal offense within the prison system.
Brian: I was also very fortunate to meet a wonderful person while I was there and who actually made me a better person. He and I had a very important relationship to me. I've been positive since 2001.
I had had men reject me constantly for being HIV positive. I tried telling them on the first date and that way I wouldn't get emotionally attached. I tried waiting until like the third date and see maybe if they got to know me better, that they could look past it. All of it it always went badly.
It was called back then being stood up. Now it's just called being ghosted. Now this is a man who was locked in the dormitory with me, and this could go very badly because a lot of us have impulse control problems, and that's why we were in prison. When I told him that I was HIV positive and that's why I wasn't going far with him, he cried and I had never had anybody react that way to me before. It was also when he told me he appreciated me, it sounded more like, “I love you” than anyone who had ever said those three words. But anyway, so our relationship was found out. We went to the hole for 60 days because even though it was consensual it's still considered evil. I went to a new housing unit because they separated us. I had gotten a job on the food cart and because of the fear of “misperception of perceived contamination,” I petitioned for a different job.
And there was a job cleaning the guards’ bathrooms. I remember one of the guards that I fairly got along with. He told me that they were trying to get me fired. I came up with the list. I’m like: “So is it because I'm gay? Is it because I'm dating a Black man? Or is it because I'm HIV positive?” He goes, "Well, a little bit of each, but mostly the last one."
ASSAULT/REPORT
Brian: It ultimately actually was even more depressing when years later after he had gotten out of prison and I still had two, two and a half more years to do. I was in a different housing unit, a minimum security one actually. This man who had flirted with me a lot who I perceived as having been fairly straightforward in my rejection of his advances. Apparently he did not necessarily view it the same way. He would do just inappropriate touching. I really tried to keep the peace. I should've been more blunt about it, but I'm also not gonna accept the blame completely either. One day he came into my cell when I was by myself and my three cellies were out.
He started choking me and he said, “You're going to suck this dick.” And I stood up. He was a little shorter than me, but he was much broader and bigger than I am. And he smacked me across the face and my head hit the bunk. I stood up at my door and I said his name.
And I said, “[censored] just smacked me ‘cause I wouldn't suck his dick.” And there was a huge hand print on my face for like two days. And the problem was if I reported it I would have been sent back to that housing unit that keeps the lights on all night, because I would've been perceived as delicate and needing to be in protective custody.
I would have lost my job. The housing unit I was in, I had a TV, I was in a cell, there was only four of us in it. And I would have been sent back to a housing unit where there's one TV for 70 people to share with the lights on at night. And we’d go to sleep, with the bathroom open to everyone.
I wasn't about to do that. And so now I was stuck on this area with him, still, and he would come over and still antagonize me and still intimidate me when I was on the toilet or something. He would come into the bathroom area. And so ultimately actually, some of my friends on the pod, one of them who I'm still really close with now, they got him off the pod and they got him out.
And then two years later, this one person was using, it’s called PREA. Prison Rape Elimination Act, he was using it to his advantage. He would flirt and get a boyfriend for a little while and then want to break up with them because he found somebody new. Now he had to get rid of the other one and he started manipulating the PREA law to his favor, and some of them were actually just openly gay guys. We were in a live in program, it was a 10 month program that you had to complete to get out of prison. He got one of them kicked out of the program and that person would have to wait 6 months to get back into the program and then do the 10 month program.
And that's messing with someone's life, just because you want to break up with them. And the guards were talking, they asked me to talk about it. And I accidentally mentioned the guy who slapped me and and they stopped and they were like, “You know we have to report that now that you said that to us, we have to investigate it.”
So I refused to give them any witnesses. I just told them the incident of what I just told you basically, leaving out the portion about getting him moved. About a month and a half or two months later, I got the results of the report when I came back from coming back from yard, the results from the report were there at the guard's desk.
It came back as unsubstantiated. So there was three choices. There was substantiated, unsubstantiated and unfounded. I started crying and it was at a time when actually the only other gay person there was riding with one guy who was pissed off at me. He and I were not being friends at the time.
I was actually alone at a time when I didn't have anybody to talk to. And I just cried. I never wanted to report it, but it was called unsubstantiated. I really had to process the fact that unsubstantiated meant they believed me, but they couldn't prove it. It was his word against mine.
Unfounded would have been, they didn't believe me, but it still hurt. And it hurt the fact that I reported it by accident, that I didn't want to talk about it. So yeah. Relationships in prison for queer people can be really hard.
Casper: I'm so sorry for all that you had to go through while you were in prison. I hear this story over and over and over again from so many people. And it's so devastating to hear the impact that it has on real people's lives, because we see prisons on television shows and in movies and stuff.
And people joke about things like prison rape and they joke about this sort of thing not realizing real people are really going through it and the relationships that people form with each other. They're so rare and they're so beautiful that people find somebody to love, or somebody to cherish or somebody to just have a friendship with inside the prison walls.
It's so rare. And then the system purposefully sent you to a different unit to tear you apart from having any sort of human relationship with another person. And if the focus is supposed to be on rehabilitation, then we should be focusing on how to make sure that humans can interact with one another.
Brian: So two things about that. There was one time they actually had me talking to someone about PREA and so I got the chance to ask them why consensual relationships were such a problem. And they said, “Because two people in a romantic relationship would fight harder if one of them got hurt or in trouble for each other than anything else.” And that was their whole reasoning. Was the fear that two people in love would take down the prison system, or take down an entire block somehow.
Casper: That pain of, even though it was an unintentional reporting something that happened to you and then having that report come back as unsubstantiated. I see that word all the time. People write in and they ask for help filing a grievance and navigating prison bureaucracy. Just trying to get some outside support because if something happens to you and you fill out a form and then that just gets shuffled around or thrown in the trash, or guards don't take it seriously or something.
It's almost impossible to have action taken when somebody in prison reports it. And so having some sort of outside support sometimes makes the process a little quicker and smoother. And so we try to help people file grievances or whatever they need advocacy wise, and reports almost always come back as unfounded or unsubstantiated.
And the wording is always, “We investigated ourselves and we found no wrongdoing.” It's hard. And it's devastating, because no level of evidence that you could provide would ever have the result come back as anything different than unsubstantiated or unfounded.
Brian: The protective custody building would not allow you to have a radio. It was one TV, 70 people, lights on, and they would not sell the new radios because their reasoning, again which is so fantastic sometimes, was that we might throw the batteries at the guard.
Now they sell us bars of soap. They sell us locks for your locker box, but they were worried about some batteries being thrown at them. Because music can help so much just to escape, just shut off the noise around you and to be deprived of that, it was horrible to not have music for so long.
Casper: I think we take that so much for granted. Doing this work, I've realized for a lot of people in prison, it's like living in the 1950s, people are still using postal mail if they can even get a pen and a paper and a stamp. Maybe they have a television set in a day room and maybe a radio and a typewriter.
And that's pretty much like the luxury of the prison system in the United States.
He started choking me and he said, “You're going to suck this dick.” And I stood up. He was a little shorter than me, but he was much broader and bigger than I am. And he smacked me across the face and my head hit the bunk. I stood up at my door and I said his name.
And I said, “[censored] just smacked me ‘cause I wouldn't suck his dick.” And there was a huge hand print on my face for like two days. And the problem was if I reported it I would have been sent back to that housing unit that keeps the lights on all night, because I would've been perceived as delicate and needing to be in protective custody.
I would have lost my job. The housing unit I was in, I had a TV, I was in a cell, there was only four of us in it. And I would have been sent back to a housing unit where there's one TV for 70 people to share with the lights on at night. And we’d go to sleep, with the bathroom open to everyone.
I wasn't about to do that. And so now I was stuck on this area with him, still, and he would come over and still antagonize me and still intimidate me when I was on the toilet or something. He would come into the bathroom area. And so ultimately actually, some of my friends on the pod, one of them who I'm still really close with now, they got him off the pod and they got him out.
And then two years later, this one person was using, it’s called PREA. Prison Rape Elimination Act, he was using it to his advantage. He would flirt and get a boyfriend for a little while and then want to break up with them because he found somebody new. Now he had to get rid of the other one and he started manipulating the PREA law to his favor, and some of them were actually just openly gay guys. We were in a live in program, it was a 10 month program that you had to complete to get out of prison. He got one of them kicked out of the program and that person would have to wait 6 months to get back into the program and then do the 10 month program.
And that's messing with someone's life, just because you want to break up with them. And the guards were talking, they asked me to talk about it. And I accidentally mentioned the guy who slapped me and and they stopped and they were like, “You know we have to report that now that you said that to us, we have to investigate it.”
So I refused to give them any witnesses. I just told them the incident of what I just told you basically, leaving out the portion about getting him moved. About a month and a half or two months later, I got the results of the report when I came back from coming back from yard, the results from the report were there at the guard's desk.
It came back as unsubstantiated. So there was three choices. There was substantiated, unsubstantiated and unfounded. I started crying and it was at a time when actually the only other gay person there was riding with one guy who was pissed off at me. He and I were not being friends at the time.
I was actually alone at a time when I didn't have anybody to talk to. And I just cried. I never wanted to report it, but it was called unsubstantiated. I really had to process the fact that unsubstantiated meant they believed me, but they couldn't prove it. It was his word against mine.
Unfounded would have been, they didn't believe me, but it still hurt. And it hurt the fact that I reported it by accident, that I didn't want to talk about it. So yeah. Relationships in prison for queer people can be really hard.
Casper: I'm so sorry for all that you had to go through while you were in prison. I hear this story over and over and over again from so many people. And it's so devastating to hear the impact that it has on real people's lives, because we see prisons on television shows and in movies and stuff.
And people joke about things like prison rape and they joke about this sort of thing not realizing real people are really going through it and the relationships that people form with each other. They're so rare and they're so beautiful that people find somebody to love, or somebody to cherish or somebody to just have a friendship with inside the prison walls.
It's so rare. And then the system purposefully sent you to a different unit to tear you apart from having any sort of human relationship with another person. And if the focus is supposed to be on rehabilitation, then we should be focusing on how to make sure that humans can interact with one another.
Brian: So two things about that. There was one time they actually had me talking to someone about PREA and so I got the chance to ask them why consensual relationships were such a problem. And they said, “Because two people in a romantic relationship would fight harder if one of them got hurt or in trouble for each other than anything else.” And that was their whole reasoning. Was the fear that two people in love would take down the prison system, or take down an entire block somehow.
Casper: That pain of, even though it was an unintentional reporting something that happened to you and then having that report come back as unsubstantiated. I see that word all the time. People write in and they ask for help filing a grievance and navigating prison bureaucracy. Just trying to get some outside support because if something happens to you and you fill out a form and then that just gets shuffled around or thrown in the trash, or guards don't take it seriously or something.
It's almost impossible to have action taken when somebody in prison reports it. And so having some sort of outside support sometimes makes the process a little quicker and smoother. And so we try to help people file grievances or whatever they need advocacy wise, and reports almost always come back as unfounded or unsubstantiated.
And the wording is always, “We investigated ourselves and we found no wrongdoing.” It's hard. And it's devastating, because no level of evidence that you could provide would ever have the result come back as anything different than unsubstantiated or unfounded.
Brian: The protective custody building would not allow you to have a radio. It was one TV, 70 people, lights on, and they would not sell the new radios because their reasoning, again which is so fantastic sometimes, was that we might throw the batteries at the guard.
Now they sell us bars of soap. They sell us locks for your locker box, but they were worried about some batteries being thrown at them. Because music can help so much just to escape, just shut off the noise around you and to be deprived of that, it was horrible to not have music for so long.
Casper: I think we take that so much for granted. Doing this work, I've realized for a lot of people in prison, it's like living in the 1950s, people are still using postal mail if they can even get a pen and a paper and a stamp. Maybe they have a television set in a day room and maybe a radio and a typewriter.
And that's pretty much like the luxury of the prison system in the United States.
*BREAK*
Conductor Trig: Teleway now arriving.
Conductor Emma: Affording supplies outside prison is difficult for struggling artists. Inside prison, it can be impossible. From media to technology, there are thousands of resources for outside artists to utilize. But prisoners are restricted from most, if not all, of these options. With limited forms of healthy physical or mental escape, prisoners suffer from higher rates of mental health issues and thoughts of suicide. Artistic creation can provide a productive way of channeling their emotions away from this negative feedback loop. A.B.O. Comix artists dedicating their time to creative pursuits engage in rehabilitative processes on their own behalf, instead of relying on the prison system. You can help artists in prison not have to choose between a meal or pen & paper, a toothbrush or a paintbrush. Your donation could provide the artistic materials that make them their next sale. Become a patron at patreon.com/abocomix, or head over to abocomix.com for more ways to donate. That's a b o c o m i x .com. Thank you for supporting our cause.
Conductor Trig: Teleway now departing.
Conductor Emma: Affording supplies outside prison is difficult for struggling artists. Inside prison, it can be impossible. From media to technology, there are thousands of resources for outside artists to utilize. But prisoners are restricted from most, if not all, of these options. With limited forms of healthy physical or mental escape, prisoners suffer from higher rates of mental health issues and thoughts of suicide. Artistic creation can provide a productive way of channeling their emotions away from this negative feedback loop. A.B.O. Comix artists dedicating their time to creative pursuits engage in rehabilitative processes on their own behalf, instead of relying on the prison system. You can help artists in prison not have to choose between a meal or pen & paper, a toothbrush or a paintbrush. Your donation could provide the artistic materials that make them their next sale. Become a patron at patreon.com/abocomix, or head over to abocomix.com for more ways to donate. That's a b o c o m i x .com. Thank you for supporting our cause.
Conductor Trig: Teleway now departing.
CREATIVITY
Casper: What did you do as far as your forms of escapism and creativity and fostering your imagination?
Brian: I spent a lot of money getting contraband pens because writing with a pencil is hard to read back after a little while. It's fine initially, but it doesn't stand the test of time as easily as a pen, but technically pens were contraband actually, because the ink could be used for tattoos.
Although ironically, that's actually really not what we used, but whatever. Actually, I was talking to my friend who has a master's degree in psychology and he's such a smart guy. And I said to him, imagine having all of your intellectual curiosity trapped in a building with no Google, with no access to a library or anything.
It's just your own silo of thoughts and those of the people around you. I used to call it live Google because with 70 people or 40 people, you can generally find the answer to most things. But not everything. If you were one of 20 people that had computer class at a time, the internet that we had was only National Geographic up to like 2007. And that was it. If it wasn't on National Geographic and between when it started and 2007, you couldn't look it up. So that is where I came up with a lot of creativity and a lot of book ideas.
Basically it was everything that I could read. So I would get about five or six different magazines. Like they had a thing called Inmates Subscriptions, and it was like $20, for five different magazine subscriptions. And I tried to get a variety. Other people getting magazines that you wouldn't ever thought of getting things that are interesting to you, but not really necessarily your normal interest, but when there’s nothing else to do, you'll read anything.
And I used to read some of the auto ones, some Sports Illustrated, skiing magazines. I mean I had interest in some of these, but I learned so much more and my brain would just start to compile things differently and reconfigure what I was taking in. Previously I had been a bartender for most of my life and a personal trainer and a sex worker.
All of those industries require storytelling. Fostering artificial relationships with people. So you become very good at telling the same story over again and making it interesting and forming a perceived bond with people that really isn't there. But the problem was as someone that is a writer by nature and a storyteller by nature, I didn't write my stories ever that I wanted to, that I thought of because I was taking the pressure valve off of my desire to storytell because every night I got to tell a story to people and so I'd come home and just go to sleep. So now I was locked in prison with no one to talk to, very few people that would talk to me.
I started to write and write my stories. Creative stories, not my story of my past, but create new stories using some of my past, but in a much more engaging way than a memoir. I have a slight history of drug use and alcohol use. So some of my stories from my actual past might be a little foggy.
So it's easier not to actually turn anything into an actual memoir because I don't know how accountable I could be held for some of my memories and how accurate some of them might be. So it's just taking the feelings of my perceived memories and making them into stories and different ways to create narrative.
And it really occupied my time and really made things much better. There's an organization, Black and Pink, which is fantastic. And I had known about them since I first went to prison basically, and I would get their newsletter and it made me feel less alone. It made me feel connected to the queer community in prisons around the U.S. But when A.B.O. Comix came around, it wasn't just a connection. It was an outlet to be heard and to feel seen and someplace to be a part of a narrative that was accepting of everyone because that first anthology that came out, I was so excited to get to draw, which I had never done before.
Maybe, in like fourth grade, drawing pictures of Garfield or something. But to actually have a purpose to take my memories from my prison experience and get to show people what my experience was. I remember the first one was about my guy, a disagreement in the kitchen.
And your expectation of who you are and what you would do in a given situation. That doesn't always pan out or live up to what you perceive yourself doing. He got into a fight with someone over cheese. And it was a fight that was not going to go well. It was actually going to be a physical fight and instead of stopping the fight, I screamed for one of my friends who was luckily standing there. So it wasn't a big scream. It was more, “Do something!”
And luckily he did, he was bigger than the both of them. And he stood between them and stopped it from becoming an actual physical fight. Nobody got in trouble, because my guy was about to go to the preferential housing unit for people that had long sentences. I didn't want anything to jeopardize it, because apparently I was also not someone that's about to get into a fight.
Years and years later, probably about five or six years later, I was in the program, one, the live in 10 month program and someone made a gay joke. Something along the lines of that's so gay or that's so whatever it was, and I heard one of the other guys goes, “Oh no, you can't say that around Meegan. He'll beat you up.” In my head, there was laughing, a lot of laughing, but I didn't say anything because I just stayed stone faced as if I would. The difference from when I got to prison and screaming for help when there was a fight to now being perceived as someone that you don't want to mess with.
And I will tell you having examined why that was, it's because I lived my authentic truth while I was in prison. There was nothing anybody could say that I hadn't already said. No one had any ammunition against me because I lived open and honestly, which made me more powerful than anyone else in there.
The only thing I hid was my HIV status. I didn't hide it from people that were important to me, but that had more repercussions than anything else. But otherwise there was nothing anybody could say to me that was new information. And that made me powerful there. So being authentic to yourself is power.
Casper: I think that's really powerful advice. It's in the back of our brains, we've been told it a whole lot, be your authentic self, live your true life, be open and honest. It's something that I was talking about with my friend Taylor too, because she hid so much of herself in prison coming there as a young kid and not knowing how to navigate her environment. She spent so much of her life trying to hide so much of herself out of fear of what would happen to her in prison.
If she came out, if she transitioned, if she was open and honest with people about how she really felt, and it destroyed her internally. And it kept her safe in some ways. Or so she felt for a while, she joined a gang to help keep her safe and put on the very masculine persona and learn to fight and, went full, toxic masculinity route.
She felt like it kept her from getting hurt physically, but internally it was really destroying her. When she finally decided to be open and honest, it completely changed her life, definitely for the better.
It seems like a simpler route to be like people aren't gonna like me if I try and be my authentic self, like people are gonna talk shit behind my back and not going to like what I have to say, but that's a very short term solution to something. And when you're looking at a life sentence for her, or several years for you, that's a long time you have to be in prison with the same people who generally probably are going to be there pretty much the same amount of time that you are.
Brian: And they're going to talk about you no matter what.
Casper: Exactly. And you might as well live for yourself and not for them. And I'm glad to hear that you've at least got respect for being authentic and telling people the truth about yourself.
Brian: I drank and used drugs when I was bartending, mostly because I was uncomfortable and it was a way to mask my insecurities. So when I went to prison, I had to summon up all the strength and courage. But when I was bartending and controlling the room from behind the bar, I had to do that in prison.
I had to bring that persona of myself to that environment. It was manufacturing an artificial confidence that I had used substances to shore up and to strengthen me or perceiving strengthening me. Once again, it was a misperception that person was inside me and I brought that personality out while sober.
In that live-in program, we had to do a morning meeting. For mother's day, I got up and sang in my head, the Joan Jett version of ‘Love is All Around’ with Mary Tyler Moore. And it was wildly accepted. One of my friends was like: “You should sing every week.” I was like, “No, I’m not going to sing every week.”
Cause it was singing in front of 130 inmates in prison. Acapella singing. I don't sing that well. But I made an agreement with them that every other week I would sing, and I did, and I always sang women's songs without changing pronouns. And I specifically sang Macy Gray, Indigo Girls, Cindy Lauper, whoever it was, but it was all songs by women to force these guys to listen to my queer perspective.
I did not shy away from being heard, because I figured 130 people, one openly gay guy, maybe two, that were more “don't ask, don't tell,” but we weren't the only gay people there and I knew somebody needed to hear it. And I kind of enjoyed bullying the inmates, them having to listen to me. It's kind of fun.
Casper: I'm sure they loved it. I actually think having that kind of entertainment. The sounds just wonderful, no matter your sexual identity or anything like that. I think just having a level of like silliness and having some fun with people. That sounds absolutely amazing. What were some of the reactions you got?
Brian: They pretended like it was torture. One of the counselors who I had to run all the music past to make sure it was approved before I did it, he would always be like, “You always do mashups.” And I'm like “I told you, it was going to be Desiree’s ‘You Gotta Be’ and Macy Gray’s, “There is Beauty in the World.’” I was like, “Just because you don't pay attention, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.”
Casper: So you mentioned earlier that people avoided you a little bit and didn’t speak to you all that often, but did you find that there were some people who openly embraced you and you made some really strong friendships and alliances while you were in prison?
Brian: 110%. There's the four guys that I mentioned that I still talk to now. Two of them FaceTimed me and one of them mooned me during that FaceTime.
All four of them are straight from different backgrounds. One of them calls up and goes, "I fucks with you heavy. I would never deny you." It was so cute.
It is great to have their support because while I was in prison, I was sober and I was able to deal with a lot of my past. But surviving through prison is creating a whole new set of issues to have to get over. I can go to meetings for substance use, but having those four guys to talk to helps more than anything. I didn't know how to interact with people when I got out.
And I sometimes still don't. Sometimes it's a challenge and anxiety presents itself, and inappropriate reactions to simple questions can occur. I have a tendency if you ask certain people that I “blow up” very quickly, I can reign it back in fairly quickly also, but sometimes my initial reaction is misguided.
Casper: It sounds like a pretty human reaction to me.
Brian: It is, but coming from an ex-con, or what I prefer a “returning citizen,” but the problem is most people don't know what I'm saying when I say that. But coming from a returning citizen, it's perceived differently if they know my past, right.
Because the assumption is that I have anger issues, that I'm going to hurt someone, that it's on purpose. That is my true nature. That is who I am, that small glimpse. So I can be calm, cool, collected, well-spoken, all it takes is one outburst. And that's what they remember.
Casper: That stigma just continues with you. And it's almost like something you can't shake off. It's so difficult for people who are coming home. Even if you subscribe to the idea that like you're repaying a debt to society, you've gone through the system and you've quote unquote, repaid your debt to society and that should be the end all be all of it.
Like you did your time and now you're back and you’re home and you're a part of our communities again. I feel like people should be embraced and supported and welcomed back home. And if this is what it's supposed to do with the system says it's supposed to do in helping people learn and grow and heal while they're inside and be ready to come back out and be a part of the community. It's always so devastating to me to hear that people come back and they're not embraced and they're stigmatized. And that's something you can't get rid of. And the larger movement right now, where we're actually starting to talk about prisons and their impact on people and communities and families and stuff.
It's inspiring, but it's very slow moving. Do you feel like that's a common question that you get, like people ask inappropriate questions or if they're really probing, are they…?
Brian: It's not even inappropriate questions is the thing, I don't mind actually talking about it.
People ask me probing questions, I'm all for. So I graduated high school in 93. I wasn't openly gay, but it was fairly well understood. And so afterwards, people that I didn't even get along with would ask me about how to interact with someone that has just come out to them, a friend or a family member.
I was very happy that they felt comfortable enough to talk to me about it. Same thing with HIV, same thing with everything. So I'm very welcoming to any question, no matter how inappropriate it is put because I feel if someone views me as so accepting and so kind that they would open up their curiosity to my experience and other people's experience, the best thing I can do is to be patient with their questions, no matter what they are. That being said, it's not questions about my past that bother me. It's sometimes people's expectations of social interactions. So it's off-handed comments are triggering, it's when people use phrases like, “Keep my name out of your mouth.”
That's a very serious statement that people now use flippantly. And it's not a flip comment. It's a serious feeling for a lot of people. Because that's what gets us in trouble, gets our lives shaken up and gets us more time and gets us possibly thrown in the hole or gets us a institutional charge, is having our name in people's mouths.
And that can be triggering sometimes. And I have to suppress that reaction because they're not saying it with malintent. What had happened to me at one point, since my release was, I created expectation of someone and I put hopes that I had had onto someone without their permission, that I viewed our relationship I think as more serious than what it ultimately was and when they pulled back, that hurt and and it was my own hope for love and acceptance. And this person was so kind that it felt right, but it wasn't.
Casper: Thank you so much for sharing super personal details. I remember seeing your comics, which I got the privilege of getting to go through again today. I remember something you had written, like on this, on the center portion of your comics and it was a bunch of what I'm taking as probably triggering phrases that you had heard while you were in prison. And one of them was, “Keep my name out of your mouth.” They were really powerful because there were things that you read and you can feel the impact of. If that was said to me, it would put me in a state of almost panic.
I do hear a lot of phrases sometimes that are different in meaning to me because I have so many friends in prison and I hear so many stories than they are to the average person who’s never been incarcerated or never interacted with people who've been incarcerated. And sometimes even just hearing it offhand from people like on the street or something will put you in the mindset of like panic almost or like a fight or flight mode and I haven't even been incarcerated.
Brian: It was funny when I first got to prison, I joked that it was inappropriate for me to use certain slang that I was like, “It's never going to sound right coming from me,” but after seven and a half years, it did. I've never lived in a place for that long before besides growing up in my hometown. This is the longest I’ve ever been in one spot since I’ve turned 18 and I can’t discount what kind of effect that had on me.
Casper: Do you feel like there were any habits or any things you picked up while you were in prison that followed you back home, that you still find yourself doing?
Brian: Well, like when you made coffee and you offered me a spoon to mix the creamer into the coffee, I forget that people have spoons.
Casper: It brings it back to those tiny little things we take for granted, like being able to stir up your coffee. As a storyteller, are there any stories that you remember, you look back on more fondly, things that like you'll think about and laugh?
Brian: So one of my previous jobs, I've been a personal trainer and I worked in a physical therapy office and I was certified and all.
I would go to the yard, I would go do my workout and stuff. So two of the trans feminine women on the block with me wanted to get a little bit of “get right.” Whenever I could get them up and out for gym at 8:30 in the morning, which wasn't often, but when we did go I created a donkey booty workout routine for them because it involved redistributing body mass ratio.
Being trans feminine persons, we wanted to increase their lower body mass without inadvertently increasing any upper body mass. So it involved doing exercises that would increase their donkey booty without giving them masculine shoulders or biceps. So we would be doing walking lunges and squats, side to side lunges.
It was so funny. For me, these are not difficult exercises. I do them all with weights, which is what I couldn't do for them. So I was afraid that these were not substantial exercises, but the next day, or the day later, when they were complaining about having trouble getting on and off their bunk, because their muscles were sore, I realized it was working fine. And we had so much fun. And then there was one time we were watching the Superbowl. And in all gay honesty, I don't remember who was playing, but I do remember Jennifer Lopez and Shakira are performing. We actually had to go up for count time. I didn't watch it, but they've left the TV on.
And one of the girls was in view of the TV we had, instead of betting on who was going to win the Super Bowl, we decided to bet on what color outfit Jennifer Lopez was gonna be wearing, because generally there's going to be either silver, gold, or white. So there was three of us. We each had a color, I forgot who won, but we had a lot more fun than you would think.
Casper: It’s always nice to hear positive, happy stories from people. Yeah, we get a lot of letters that are very sad and dark. But inevitably every single letter I get always has something that makes me smile, and really appreciate my fellow human beings and people get so creative inside prison.
It's absolutely incredible, they can make the best in any situation and they can find happiness in it. And that's always really affirming to me to hear. Do you have anything else you want to share with folks? Is there anything you'd like to plug or any shout-outs or anything you want to leave us with any parting remarks?
Brian: No. [Laughs]
Casper: Fair enough. It's absolutely wonderful to have you and to get to meet you in person and thank you so much for doing this recording.
Brian: I spent a lot of money getting contraband pens because writing with a pencil is hard to read back after a little while. It's fine initially, but it doesn't stand the test of time as easily as a pen, but technically pens were contraband actually, because the ink could be used for tattoos.
Although ironically, that's actually really not what we used, but whatever. Actually, I was talking to my friend who has a master's degree in psychology and he's such a smart guy. And I said to him, imagine having all of your intellectual curiosity trapped in a building with no Google, with no access to a library or anything.
It's just your own silo of thoughts and those of the people around you. I used to call it live Google because with 70 people or 40 people, you can generally find the answer to most things. But not everything. If you were one of 20 people that had computer class at a time, the internet that we had was only National Geographic up to like 2007. And that was it. If it wasn't on National Geographic and between when it started and 2007, you couldn't look it up. So that is where I came up with a lot of creativity and a lot of book ideas.
Basically it was everything that I could read. So I would get about five or six different magazines. Like they had a thing called Inmates Subscriptions, and it was like $20, for five different magazine subscriptions. And I tried to get a variety. Other people getting magazines that you wouldn't ever thought of getting things that are interesting to you, but not really necessarily your normal interest, but when there’s nothing else to do, you'll read anything.
And I used to read some of the auto ones, some Sports Illustrated, skiing magazines. I mean I had interest in some of these, but I learned so much more and my brain would just start to compile things differently and reconfigure what I was taking in. Previously I had been a bartender for most of my life and a personal trainer and a sex worker.
All of those industries require storytelling. Fostering artificial relationships with people. So you become very good at telling the same story over again and making it interesting and forming a perceived bond with people that really isn't there. But the problem was as someone that is a writer by nature and a storyteller by nature, I didn't write my stories ever that I wanted to, that I thought of because I was taking the pressure valve off of my desire to storytell because every night I got to tell a story to people and so I'd come home and just go to sleep. So now I was locked in prison with no one to talk to, very few people that would talk to me.
I started to write and write my stories. Creative stories, not my story of my past, but create new stories using some of my past, but in a much more engaging way than a memoir. I have a slight history of drug use and alcohol use. So some of my stories from my actual past might be a little foggy.
So it's easier not to actually turn anything into an actual memoir because I don't know how accountable I could be held for some of my memories and how accurate some of them might be. So it's just taking the feelings of my perceived memories and making them into stories and different ways to create narrative.
And it really occupied my time and really made things much better. There's an organization, Black and Pink, which is fantastic. And I had known about them since I first went to prison basically, and I would get their newsletter and it made me feel less alone. It made me feel connected to the queer community in prisons around the U.S. But when A.B.O. Comix came around, it wasn't just a connection. It was an outlet to be heard and to feel seen and someplace to be a part of a narrative that was accepting of everyone because that first anthology that came out, I was so excited to get to draw, which I had never done before.
Maybe, in like fourth grade, drawing pictures of Garfield or something. But to actually have a purpose to take my memories from my prison experience and get to show people what my experience was. I remember the first one was about my guy, a disagreement in the kitchen.
And your expectation of who you are and what you would do in a given situation. That doesn't always pan out or live up to what you perceive yourself doing. He got into a fight with someone over cheese. And it was a fight that was not going to go well. It was actually going to be a physical fight and instead of stopping the fight, I screamed for one of my friends who was luckily standing there. So it wasn't a big scream. It was more, “Do something!”
And luckily he did, he was bigger than the both of them. And he stood between them and stopped it from becoming an actual physical fight. Nobody got in trouble, because my guy was about to go to the preferential housing unit for people that had long sentences. I didn't want anything to jeopardize it, because apparently I was also not someone that's about to get into a fight.
Years and years later, probably about five or six years later, I was in the program, one, the live in 10 month program and someone made a gay joke. Something along the lines of that's so gay or that's so whatever it was, and I heard one of the other guys goes, “Oh no, you can't say that around Meegan. He'll beat you up.” In my head, there was laughing, a lot of laughing, but I didn't say anything because I just stayed stone faced as if I would. The difference from when I got to prison and screaming for help when there was a fight to now being perceived as someone that you don't want to mess with.
And I will tell you having examined why that was, it's because I lived my authentic truth while I was in prison. There was nothing anybody could say that I hadn't already said. No one had any ammunition against me because I lived open and honestly, which made me more powerful than anyone else in there.
The only thing I hid was my HIV status. I didn't hide it from people that were important to me, but that had more repercussions than anything else. But otherwise there was nothing anybody could say to me that was new information. And that made me powerful there. So being authentic to yourself is power.
Casper: I think that's really powerful advice. It's in the back of our brains, we've been told it a whole lot, be your authentic self, live your true life, be open and honest. It's something that I was talking about with my friend Taylor too, because she hid so much of herself in prison coming there as a young kid and not knowing how to navigate her environment. She spent so much of her life trying to hide so much of herself out of fear of what would happen to her in prison.
If she came out, if she transitioned, if she was open and honest with people about how she really felt, and it destroyed her internally. And it kept her safe in some ways. Or so she felt for a while, she joined a gang to help keep her safe and put on the very masculine persona and learn to fight and, went full, toxic masculinity route.
She felt like it kept her from getting hurt physically, but internally it was really destroying her. When she finally decided to be open and honest, it completely changed her life, definitely for the better.
It seems like a simpler route to be like people aren't gonna like me if I try and be my authentic self, like people are gonna talk shit behind my back and not going to like what I have to say, but that's a very short term solution to something. And when you're looking at a life sentence for her, or several years for you, that's a long time you have to be in prison with the same people who generally probably are going to be there pretty much the same amount of time that you are.
Brian: And they're going to talk about you no matter what.
Casper: Exactly. And you might as well live for yourself and not for them. And I'm glad to hear that you've at least got respect for being authentic and telling people the truth about yourself.
Brian: I drank and used drugs when I was bartending, mostly because I was uncomfortable and it was a way to mask my insecurities. So when I went to prison, I had to summon up all the strength and courage. But when I was bartending and controlling the room from behind the bar, I had to do that in prison.
I had to bring that persona of myself to that environment. It was manufacturing an artificial confidence that I had used substances to shore up and to strengthen me or perceiving strengthening me. Once again, it was a misperception that person was inside me and I brought that personality out while sober.
In that live-in program, we had to do a morning meeting. For mother's day, I got up and sang in my head, the Joan Jett version of ‘Love is All Around’ with Mary Tyler Moore. And it was wildly accepted. One of my friends was like: “You should sing every week.” I was like, “No, I’m not going to sing every week.”
Cause it was singing in front of 130 inmates in prison. Acapella singing. I don't sing that well. But I made an agreement with them that every other week I would sing, and I did, and I always sang women's songs without changing pronouns. And I specifically sang Macy Gray, Indigo Girls, Cindy Lauper, whoever it was, but it was all songs by women to force these guys to listen to my queer perspective.
I did not shy away from being heard, because I figured 130 people, one openly gay guy, maybe two, that were more “don't ask, don't tell,” but we weren't the only gay people there and I knew somebody needed to hear it. And I kind of enjoyed bullying the inmates, them having to listen to me. It's kind of fun.
Casper: I'm sure they loved it. I actually think having that kind of entertainment. The sounds just wonderful, no matter your sexual identity or anything like that. I think just having a level of like silliness and having some fun with people. That sounds absolutely amazing. What were some of the reactions you got?
Brian: They pretended like it was torture. One of the counselors who I had to run all the music past to make sure it was approved before I did it, he would always be like, “You always do mashups.” And I'm like “I told you, it was going to be Desiree’s ‘You Gotta Be’ and Macy Gray’s, “There is Beauty in the World.’” I was like, “Just because you don't pay attention, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.”
Casper: So you mentioned earlier that people avoided you a little bit and didn’t speak to you all that often, but did you find that there were some people who openly embraced you and you made some really strong friendships and alliances while you were in prison?
Brian: 110%. There's the four guys that I mentioned that I still talk to now. Two of them FaceTimed me and one of them mooned me during that FaceTime.
All four of them are straight from different backgrounds. One of them calls up and goes, "I fucks with you heavy. I would never deny you." It was so cute.
It is great to have their support because while I was in prison, I was sober and I was able to deal with a lot of my past. But surviving through prison is creating a whole new set of issues to have to get over. I can go to meetings for substance use, but having those four guys to talk to helps more than anything. I didn't know how to interact with people when I got out.
And I sometimes still don't. Sometimes it's a challenge and anxiety presents itself, and inappropriate reactions to simple questions can occur. I have a tendency if you ask certain people that I “blow up” very quickly, I can reign it back in fairly quickly also, but sometimes my initial reaction is misguided.
Casper: It sounds like a pretty human reaction to me.
Brian: It is, but coming from an ex-con, or what I prefer a “returning citizen,” but the problem is most people don't know what I'm saying when I say that. But coming from a returning citizen, it's perceived differently if they know my past, right.
Because the assumption is that I have anger issues, that I'm going to hurt someone, that it's on purpose. That is my true nature. That is who I am, that small glimpse. So I can be calm, cool, collected, well-spoken, all it takes is one outburst. And that's what they remember.
Casper: That stigma just continues with you. And it's almost like something you can't shake off. It's so difficult for people who are coming home. Even if you subscribe to the idea that like you're repaying a debt to society, you've gone through the system and you've quote unquote, repaid your debt to society and that should be the end all be all of it.
Like you did your time and now you're back and you’re home and you're a part of our communities again. I feel like people should be embraced and supported and welcomed back home. And if this is what it's supposed to do with the system says it's supposed to do in helping people learn and grow and heal while they're inside and be ready to come back out and be a part of the community. It's always so devastating to me to hear that people come back and they're not embraced and they're stigmatized. And that's something you can't get rid of. And the larger movement right now, where we're actually starting to talk about prisons and their impact on people and communities and families and stuff.
It's inspiring, but it's very slow moving. Do you feel like that's a common question that you get, like people ask inappropriate questions or if they're really probing, are they…?
Brian: It's not even inappropriate questions is the thing, I don't mind actually talking about it.
People ask me probing questions, I'm all for. So I graduated high school in 93. I wasn't openly gay, but it was fairly well understood. And so afterwards, people that I didn't even get along with would ask me about how to interact with someone that has just come out to them, a friend or a family member.
I was very happy that they felt comfortable enough to talk to me about it. Same thing with HIV, same thing with everything. So I'm very welcoming to any question, no matter how inappropriate it is put because I feel if someone views me as so accepting and so kind that they would open up their curiosity to my experience and other people's experience, the best thing I can do is to be patient with their questions, no matter what they are. That being said, it's not questions about my past that bother me. It's sometimes people's expectations of social interactions. So it's off-handed comments are triggering, it's when people use phrases like, “Keep my name out of your mouth.”
That's a very serious statement that people now use flippantly. And it's not a flip comment. It's a serious feeling for a lot of people. Because that's what gets us in trouble, gets our lives shaken up and gets us more time and gets us possibly thrown in the hole or gets us a institutional charge, is having our name in people's mouths.
And that can be triggering sometimes. And I have to suppress that reaction because they're not saying it with malintent. What had happened to me at one point, since my release was, I created expectation of someone and I put hopes that I had had onto someone without their permission, that I viewed our relationship I think as more serious than what it ultimately was and when they pulled back, that hurt and and it was my own hope for love and acceptance. And this person was so kind that it felt right, but it wasn't.
Casper: Thank you so much for sharing super personal details. I remember seeing your comics, which I got the privilege of getting to go through again today. I remember something you had written, like on this, on the center portion of your comics and it was a bunch of what I'm taking as probably triggering phrases that you had heard while you were in prison. And one of them was, “Keep my name out of your mouth.” They were really powerful because there were things that you read and you can feel the impact of. If that was said to me, it would put me in a state of almost panic.
I do hear a lot of phrases sometimes that are different in meaning to me because I have so many friends in prison and I hear so many stories than they are to the average person who’s never been incarcerated or never interacted with people who've been incarcerated. And sometimes even just hearing it offhand from people like on the street or something will put you in the mindset of like panic almost or like a fight or flight mode and I haven't even been incarcerated.
Brian: It was funny when I first got to prison, I joked that it was inappropriate for me to use certain slang that I was like, “It's never going to sound right coming from me,” but after seven and a half years, it did. I've never lived in a place for that long before besides growing up in my hometown. This is the longest I’ve ever been in one spot since I’ve turned 18 and I can’t discount what kind of effect that had on me.
Casper: Do you feel like there were any habits or any things you picked up while you were in prison that followed you back home, that you still find yourself doing?
Brian: Well, like when you made coffee and you offered me a spoon to mix the creamer into the coffee, I forget that people have spoons.
Casper: It brings it back to those tiny little things we take for granted, like being able to stir up your coffee. As a storyteller, are there any stories that you remember, you look back on more fondly, things that like you'll think about and laugh?
Brian: So one of my previous jobs, I've been a personal trainer and I worked in a physical therapy office and I was certified and all.
I would go to the yard, I would go do my workout and stuff. So two of the trans feminine women on the block with me wanted to get a little bit of “get right.” Whenever I could get them up and out for gym at 8:30 in the morning, which wasn't often, but when we did go I created a donkey booty workout routine for them because it involved redistributing body mass ratio.
Being trans feminine persons, we wanted to increase their lower body mass without inadvertently increasing any upper body mass. So it involved doing exercises that would increase their donkey booty without giving them masculine shoulders or biceps. So we would be doing walking lunges and squats, side to side lunges.
It was so funny. For me, these are not difficult exercises. I do them all with weights, which is what I couldn't do for them. So I was afraid that these were not substantial exercises, but the next day, or the day later, when they were complaining about having trouble getting on and off their bunk, because their muscles were sore, I realized it was working fine. And we had so much fun. And then there was one time we were watching the Superbowl. And in all gay honesty, I don't remember who was playing, but I do remember Jennifer Lopez and Shakira are performing. We actually had to go up for count time. I didn't watch it, but they've left the TV on.
And one of the girls was in view of the TV we had, instead of betting on who was going to win the Super Bowl, we decided to bet on what color outfit Jennifer Lopez was gonna be wearing, because generally there's going to be either silver, gold, or white. So there was three of us. We each had a color, I forgot who won, but we had a lot more fun than you would think.
Casper: It’s always nice to hear positive, happy stories from people. Yeah, we get a lot of letters that are very sad and dark. But inevitably every single letter I get always has something that makes me smile, and really appreciate my fellow human beings and people get so creative inside prison.
It's absolutely incredible, they can make the best in any situation and they can find happiness in it. And that's always really affirming to me to hear. Do you have anything else you want to share with folks? Is there anything you'd like to plug or any shout-outs or anything you want to leave us with any parting remarks?
Brian: No. [Laughs]
Casper: Fair enough. It's absolutely wonderful to have you and to get to meet you in person and thank you so much for doing this recording.
OUTRO
Casper: It’s so rare that we get to meet our contributors in person so we’re especially glad to have been able to today. Brian’s story really resonated with many of us here at A.B.O. Comix and we hope it did for you too. We look forward to future hangouts with our friend and the incredible results we will all achieve with his patented donkey booty workout routine.
Thank you to everyone who made this podcast possible. Shoutout to the Bay Area’s finest tattoo artist and my wife, Brett Baumgart, for their eternal support and assistance with every endeavor we pursue. Special thanks to our Teleway Conductors, Trig, L.A., Ollie, Caroline, Nic, Emma, Aryn, and Jo for their countless hours spent ensuring that we can provide a voice for those that have been silenced. Our Patreon supporters help keep the Teleway fueled and running smoothly. Thank you to Hazel, Drae, Emily, and Wendy. If you would like your name read in a future episode, become one of our subscribers at patreon.com/abocomix. To find out how you can contribute to our cause, visit abocomix.com. That’s a-b-o-c-o-m-i-x.com.
While we perform routine maintenance on the Teleway, our next episode will feature Ashley, a prison psychologist, at Teleway Central Station. Thanks for riding Teleway 411. Please remain seated as the Teleway proceeds forward in T-minus 3, 2, 1.
*Teleway startup*
Thank you to everyone who made this podcast possible. Shoutout to the Bay Area’s finest tattoo artist and my wife, Brett Baumgart, for their eternal support and assistance with every endeavor we pursue. Special thanks to our Teleway Conductors, Trig, L.A., Ollie, Caroline, Nic, Emma, Aryn, and Jo for their countless hours spent ensuring that we can provide a voice for those that have been silenced. Our Patreon supporters help keep the Teleway fueled and running smoothly. Thank you to Hazel, Drae, Emily, and Wendy. If you would like your name read in a future episode, become one of our subscribers at patreon.com/abocomix. To find out how you can contribute to our cause, visit abocomix.com. That’s a-b-o-c-o-m-i-x.com.
While we perform routine maintenance on the Teleway, our next episode will feature Ashley, a prison psychologist, at Teleway Central Station. Thanks for riding Teleway 411. Please remain seated as the Teleway proceeds forward in T-minus 3, 2, 1.
*Teleway startup*